It was in Paris that I saw my first Nobel prize winners....8 of them in total I believe. Of the millions of scientists in the world, and thousands for each field, a maximum of three gets awarded with the ultimate accolade every year, so it is really an incredible achievement to win one.

The first thing to notice about the prize winners is their age... the youngest of them seemed to be Gerard 't Hooft (yes, I got the apostrophe right...) (Physics '97) and Harold Kroto (Chemistry '99), and both were at least in the late 40s or early 50s. Most of the others seemed well into their 50s, and Masatoshi Koshiba (Physics '02) seemed positively geriatric.

Most of them were there to give talks, and so it was from their presentations that my impressions of them were made. The first Nobelist talk was given by Zhores Alpherov (Physics '00). His talk was supposed to be 'Physics and Information Technology', but within 2 slides he'd gone of talking about heterojunction semiconductors and bipolar transistors, stuff that I'd covered in the much-maligned solid-state physics course in first term, but by the halfway point I was completely lost. I'm a third year university student, so I wonder what the high school students in the audience thought about it. I amused myself by laughing at his accent. He has this very RRRRRRuuuusssian accent when he talks, like something a Soviet character out of some bad pantomime. I bet he still calls his friends 'comrades' and has glass of vodka when he wakes up in the morning. One interesting thing is that the work which led to his Nobel prize seemed to date from the early '60s.

The others fortunately did pitch their talks at a somewhat lower level, to an extent that Claude Cohen Tannoudji's (Physics '97) talk on quantum physics touched on stuff that I already knew, but I'm sure lots of people in the audience appreciated this level. Harold Kroto's talk on nanotechnology was notable for his superb presentation style. I can bet that every single person in the audience was at full attention during his talk. He didn't just present the science of nanotech (although admittedly at a pretty low level), but he conveyed the sense of adventure in the journey towards the discoveries, and did so with wit and humour. Although I disagreed with some of his points, there was no doubt that his presentation style is totally fantastic.

Incidentally, the only talk in which I fell asleep was at 't Hooft's talk on particle physics. It wasn't that his talk was dull, but I was completely exhausted from lack of sleep (my roommate at the hotel couldn't sleep, and kept the lights open, tossing and turning etc...that kept me from sleeping as well).

Kobashi was another interesting talk. His talk had been titled 'Cosmology and Astrophysics in the 21st century'. So he tottered on to the stage with his cane, sat down (other speakers had did their presentations at the lectern), made his apologies for his frailty, and announced that he was going to talk on neutrinos instead of the scheduled topic. I guess being a Nobel Laureate had its perks, but anyway neutrinos was his field of expertise anyway. I later described his style to a friend in two words: wizened sageness. He spoke in a very slow pace, with the classic Japanese accent, and periodically jabbed at the screen with his walking stick. It was like the old man from Karate Kid, only this guy was even more sagely, and spoke his words of wisdom with a patience borne out of, well, age.

After the conference, I spent my time during the lectures mimicking the speakers, especially Alpherov. During Nuclear and Particle physics, the lecturer is (I think) from one of the former Soviet republics, so I asked my questions in a perfect Russian accent. I don't think he was particularly amused.

Here are some Googled pics of the people I'm talking about...couldn't be arsed to take/upload my own....

Koshiba:


Alpherov (on the left...hope I don't need to tell you who the guy on the right is):


Kroto: